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The Daily Northwestern

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Northwestern University and Evanston's Only Daily News Source Since 1881

The Daily Northwestern

Northwestern University and Evanston's Only Daily News Source Since 1881

The Daily Northwestern

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Northwestern grad student’s site ranks most influential tweets

Reading tweets has gotten a little bit easier thanks to a new website created by a Northwestern graduate student.

Reaching 25,000 hits on Sept. 9 and expanding its pool of visitors daily, pulseofthetweeters.com constantly updates and identifies the most influential users on Twitter.

Ramanathan Narayanan, a Ph.D. candidate in NU’s electrical engineering and computer science department, developed the idea for pulseofthetweeters.com from a data-mining thesis he was working on under the supervision of EECS department chair and professor Alok Choudhary in October 2009. The site uses a ranking algorithm that follows the day’s trending topics.

“We were looking for things to work on that not only had academic interests or difficult problems to solve but also something that could directly impact a large number of people,” Narayanan said. “Twitter is a prime candidate because it’s the fastest growing social micro-blogging website.”

Pulseofthetweeters.com aims to simplify the process of sifting through the millions of tweets Twitter sees on a daily basis. The site selects the 10 users on any given trending topic who receive the most responses to their tweets and thus are deemed the most influential users.

“If you know Twitter, one of the difficult things about it is that there is so much information, and it’s really difficult for a single user to synthesize and digest all that information,” Narayanan said. “So what we’re trying to do …is to prioritize the tweets in such a way that if you want to just look at 10 of the tweets instead of 10,000, (the site highlight) which 10 you should be looking at.”

The 10 tweeters that top the rankings are chosen according to their relevance to the trending topic and theamount of feedback from other users. Choudhary said when Troy Aikman tweets about Monday night football, people are more likely to respond because he has credibility in the field. However, a well-known NU law professor who tweets about Monday night football probably wouldn’t get the same response, he said.

“Even though he may be very well-known in law, he’s not going to be as influential in the topic of Monday night football,” Choudhary said.

However, for avid Twitter user Weinberg senior Sana Rahim, the technology pulseofthetweeters.com aims to offer what already exists within Twitter.com.

“Because I’m already following the people that I would want to read, I wouldn’t use an external site to supplement that,” Rahim said. “I already feel like the way you use Twitter is you can selectively choose whom you want to follow and whom you want to read about, so in a sense that’s enough.”

Pulseofthetweeters.com made its Internet debut in May, and five months later, Choudhary, Narayanan and a small team of Ph.D. students are planning for the site’s growth. Choudhary said he is still recruiting people knowledgeable about computer science, applications or Twitter to assist in the project. Choudhary and his team hope to develop specific applications such as user customization, which would allow users to do their own data mining from the site, he said.

Bienen sophomore Robinson Meyer uses Twitter on a frequent basis but said he would appreciate an improved and geographically personalized version of pulseofthetweeters.com.

“With Twitter, the smaller the arena, the more useful it is,” Meyer said. “Being able to use this on a city-by-city basis would be really useful because you could then figure out who the most influential people are within your metro area.”

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Northwestern University and Evanston's Only Daily News Source Since 1881
Northwestern grad student’s site ranks most influential tweets